Tobias Wolff

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Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff (born June 19, 1945) is an American short story writer, memoirist, author, and educator of creative writing.

He is best known for his memoirs, particularly This Boy's Life (1989) and In Pharaoh's Army (1994).

He has released four short story collections and two books, including The Barracks Thief (1984), which received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Wolff earned a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in September 2015, and he has taught at Stanford University (1997), where he is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences.

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Life and career

Wolff was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the second son of Rosemary (Loftus) from Hartford, Connecticut, and Arthur Samuels Wolff, an aeronautical engineer who was a son of a Jewish doctor and his wife. The father had become Episcopalian, and Wolff did not know about his father's Jewish roots until he was an adult. (Wolff was born and identifies as Catholic, like his mother)

Wolff was five years old when his elder brother Geoffrey was twelve years old; he and his mother lived in a number of cities, including Seattle, Washington, when he was an adolescent. They lived in Newhalem, a small business town in the North Cascade Mountains, where his stepfather, Robert Thompson, worked at Seattle City Light, after she remarried. During this period, his father and brother lived on the East Coast. Geoffrey knew nothing about where his brother was before he enrolled Princeton.

Wolff was a Boy Scout when he was a child and had a local newspaper route. Wolff applied to and was accepted by The Hill School, 35 miles from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, after attending Concrete High School in Concrete, also in the North Cascades. He had applied under the name "Tobias Jonathan von Ansell-Wolf III," referring to one of his father's names, Saunders Ansell-Wolf 3d. Wolff was later discovered to have forged his transcripts and recommendation letters, he was fired.

Wolff served in the US Army from 1964 to 1968, when he served in Special Forces, learned Vietnamese, and served as an advisor in Vietnam. He obtained his First Class Honours degree in English from Hertford College, Oxford (1972). He was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University, where he obtained his M.A. after returning to the United States in 1975.

Wolff taught Syracuse University from 1980 to 1997, teaching now and writing. In 1981, he published his first short story collection. He was an instructor in Syracuse's graduate writing program and was on the faculty with Raymond Carver. Jay McInerney, Tom Perrotta, George Saunders, Alice Sebold, William Tester, William Tester, Ken Garcia, Dana C. Kabel, Jan-Marie Spanard, and Paul Watkins were among the Syracuse authors who studied with Wolff as students.

Wolff moved to Stanford, where he is both the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor at the School of Humanities and Sciences. He has taught English and creative writing, as well as being the director of Stanford's Creative Writing Program from 2000 to 2002.

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Awards and honors

• 1985 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Barracks Thief
• 1989 Whiting Award for Fiction and Nonfiction
• 2006 PEN/Malamud Award (co-winner)
• 2008 The Story Prize
• 2014 Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement, Oregon State University
• 2014 elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters,
• 2015 National Medal of Arts, US National Endowment for the Arts